Regular readers know that I’m not a politico. Nevertheless, I’m ready to make a prediction (of sorts). I get the very strong feeling that America will not go for an unknown quantity come November.

From the heart of DemocratLand, over at TPM Cafe, here’s why:

Clinton deserves a huge amount of credit – especially from the press corps. Tonight should be a wake-up call: We need to take seriously that outside of those cutting very cool YouTube videos and packing unbelievably large rallies, there is a significant silent – at times – majority of working-class whites, Latinos, seniors, and women who like Hillary Clinton, and will vote for her. For Obama, he has upscale whites and African-Americans …

Even more devastatingly accurate is this from Jim Sleeper, also at TPM Cafe:

Obama is in trouble if too many of his famously small $20 and $30 contributions come … mainly from people like the up-and-coming young white writers and journalists with whom I watched one of the recent Democratic debates from the tony (but not too tony) New York neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.

Every time John Edwards mentioned broken workers in mills he’d known, the young crowd watching the debate hooted derisively, “The mill!, The mill!” Every time Hillary Clinton mentioned her 35 years of experience, they hooted, too.

Yep. The wiseasses at the back of the classroom—or in the leftosphere—will not put Barack Obama in the White House. More to the point, they probably would do nothing to help him realize the Democrats’ supposed dreams [e.a.]:

I fear that too many young whites with bright prospects have no really serious intention of redressing the growing inequities which the neoliberal world that employs them is spawning, not just between themselves and poor blacks on the Southside but, these days, between blacks and blacks, and women and women, let alone between cool young whites like themselves and the declasse, lumpy white and Latino workers all around them.

Not that my young friends defend wholeheartedly the system in which they’re prospering. To their credit, it makes them uncomfortable. But they grasp at mostly symbolic gestures of a politics of moral posturing that relieves racial and class guilt and steadies their moral self-regard with smallish contributions to Obama, an Ivy alum whom they trust to help those people on the Southside without dragging them too deeply into it; without reconfiguring how we charter our corporations and re-construe the private and public investments that employ upscale young whites and well-behaved non-whites; and certainly without redistributing their own bright prospects and future prerogatives and second homes.

This pretty much reflects the conversations I’ve had with my son, who happens to live in Brooklyn. What are you planning to do to help Obama’s agenda after he gets elected? I asked.

He had no answer. It never occurred to him that merely voting for Obama isn’t enough. In this, he’s like most Americans, who are not involved in public service.

I don’t blame my son for casting a symbolic vote. I blame Barack Obama, his campaign strategists, and his supporters—particularly Oprah Winfrey—for suggesting to a gullible public that voting for Obama is enough, an end in itself.

That is a huge load of smelly bullshit, and I know in my gut that in early-21st-century America, with the enormous raft of problems facing us, his campaign will not fly beyond the Precincts of Political Correctness.

He couldn’t even win Massachusetts after the Kennedy Coronation, not to
mention California.

Obama deployed powerhouse friends, including Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. A Sunday Los Angeles rally with Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and Kennedy’s niece, Maria Shriver, added high-profile female counterweight to Clinton.

“If Barack Obama was a state, he’d be California,” said Shriver, wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Kennedys have strong resonance in California.

Really? I have yet to see evidence of that. What I see is a lot of Kennedys who have expended their dwindling-to-nonexistent political capital on a mirage.

An election is for votes.
You can market celebrities to potential voters, but that doesn’t make them behave like consumers.

Is it possible to do anything but sit back and gawk at the twenty-ring circus otherwise known as the primary campaign of 2008?

As if an endorsement from the Kennedys didn’t take us far enough back in time, now Ike’s granddaughter Susan Eisenhower is backing Obama:

Today we are engaged in a debate about these very issues. Deep in America’s heart, I believe, is the nagging fear that our best years as a nation may be over. We are disliked overseas and feel insecure at home. We watch as our federal budget hemorrhages red ink and our civil liberties are eroded. Crises in energy, health care and education threaten our way of life and our ability to compete internationally. There are also the issues of a costly, unpopular war; a long-neglected infrastructure; and an aging and increasingly needy population.

I am not alone in worrying that my generation will fail to do what my grandfather’s did so well: Leave America a better, stronger place than the one it found.

Meanwhile, Ann Coulter would rather vote for Hillary Clinton than see John McCain become president:

What just happened? Earth hit a wormhole?

Archconservative writer Ann Coulter: “I’m a Hillary girl now. She lies less than John McCain. She’s smarter than John McCain, so that when she’s caught shamelessly lying, at least the Clintons know they’ve been caught lying. McCain is so stupid, he doesn’t even know he’s been caught.”

What the hell is going on around here?

The Harvard Crimson endorses Obama:

Various critics have voiced concerns that Obama is too ambitious and inexperienced to be the next president of the United States. We disagree. Obama’s candidacy reflects a lack of political maneuvering and instead is based on a desire to see dramatic change in the political system. And what Sen. Obama might lack in political experience, he makes up with sound judgment, intelligence, charisma, and a personable and bipartisan demeanor. Furthermore, in office he will surround himself with some of the smartest and most experienced advisors in the world.

Obama represents an opportunity for a Democratic nominee who represents the value of service, intelligence, and judgment, and, most of all, an opportunity for real change, unburdened by favors owed and ideals lost. He deserves your vote.

Andrew Sullivan says “the younger generation gets it.”

But that’s not true across the board, as Matthew Yglesias says—he understands the rough stuff and the need for it.

Barack Obama talks about getting roughed up by Hillary and Bill Clinton: “This is good practice for me so, you know, when I take on these Republicans I’ll be accustomed to it.”

I have no idea if he genuinely means that, but it’s true either way.

And, Yglesias concludes [e.a.]:

I think it’s good for the rival campaigns to really go after one another. It’s politics, and people who want to succeed in it need the practice.

This is true. Everybody who thinks politics (and life) should be all kumbaya had better think again. No one likes aggression and negativity and certainly everyone would prefer kumbaya, but if you hate the status quo, the only way to change it is to fight it. And that means politics, often hardball politics. Confrontation. Yelling. Getting hot and bothered.  That’s not very popular behavior among those who are, say, 35 and under. But it’s who we are as human beings, and fighting it out (though not violently, of course) is also good for our democracy.

It’s certainly not the first time I’ve talked about people’s personal relationship to power in their everyday lives. In July 2006, I blogged about a piece in the L.A. Times that described certain hiphop moguls embrace of a book by Robert Greene, called Power. I wrote:

[Here's] a cool piece of pop sociology written by someone other than David Brooks. This one is from Chris Lee, writing in the L.A. Times, about hip-hop moguls’ (Kanye West and Jay Z are among the devotees) fascination with The 48 Laws of Power, a quirky Swimming with the Sharks-type manual for winning at the game of life by synthezing strategies from famous historical courtiers and warriors and generals-from Sun-Tzu to Machiavelli to Richelieu.

…

The book is like a martial-arts manual for the business,” said Quincy “QD3″ Jones III, a rap producer turned filmmaker who is making a feature documentary about “The 48 Laws’ ” hip-hop connection. “It teaches people in our demographic how to think more holistically about their business practices.”

Lee points out that reviewers saw things rather differently:

“By the 36th law, you start to feel unclean and worried about your own morality,” said one. “By the 44th, you have accepted the fact that you are basically immoral and so is the world. By the time you reach No. 48, you are saying: ‘Right, who is my first victim?’ “

I kinda know what he means. It is kind of disappointing to find your peace-loving self drawn to such an unlikely book. But I confess: I was.

Yes I was. And you should be too. Especially when you read Greene’s warning about people who profess that they are above political games:

To some people the notion of consciously playing power games-no matter how indirect-seems evil, asocial, a relic of the past. they believe they can opt out of the game by behaving in ways that have nothing to do with power. You must beware of such people, for while they express such opinions outwardly, they are often among the most adept players at power.

That got my attention. Greene continued:

They utilize strategies that cleverly disguise the nature of the manipulation involved. These types, for example, will often display their weakness and lack of power as a kind of moral virtue. But true powerlessness, without any motive of self-interest, would not publicize its weakness to gain sympathy or respect. Making a show of one’s weakness is actually a very effective strategy, subtle and deceptive, in the game of power (see Law 22, the Surrender Tactic).

Recognize anyone there? the guy who his wife has described as “the real deal”?

Obama is a politician, all right. He’s just not as obvious about it as Bill and Hillary Clinton. And if he’s not a politician, or as hard-nosed and cynical a politician as they are (and his wife tries to distance herself from such politics in the article I linked above), then no matter how great his vision and his ideas, he won’t have the power to impose his will.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but so it goes.

There’s an interesting conversation over at Matthew Yglesias’s place, prompted by Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the new Atlantic, in which he seems to suggest (I haven’t had time to read the piece myself yet; but I am interested in the tenor of the conversation about the topic) that the only foreign policy alternative Bush could turn to other than the neocons’ was the realists’, as represented by the reprehensible (my characterization, not Goldberg’s) Brent Scowcroft [e.a.]:

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers mine Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article on the future of Iraq for the hilarious section where he reports that Norm Podhoretz doesn’t know what a Kurd is, but I thought I might say something about a more serious issue Goldberg raises. In particular, this near the end:

It is true that the neoconservatives’ dream of Middle East democracy has proved to be a mirage. But it’s not as though the neocons’ principal foils, the foreign-policy realists, who view stability as a paramount virtue, have covered themselves in glory in the post-9/11 era. Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Washington’s senior advocate of foreign-policy realism, told me not long ago of a conversation he had had with his onetime protégée Condoleezza Rice. “She says, ‘We’re going to democratize Iraq,’ and I said, ‘Condi, you’re not going to democratize Iraq,’ and she said, ‘You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,’ and she comes back to this thing, that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years, and so on and so forth. But we’ve had 50 years of peace.” Of course, what Scowcroft fails to note here is that al-Qaeda attacked us in part because America is the prime backer of its enemies, the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The other thing Scowcroft fails to note, of course, is that just because “we’ve had peace,” there hasn’t been peace in the region for 50 years.

Some of Yglesias’s commenters agree with me:

But Scowcroft’s point of view at least reaches a minimal standard of coherence.

What? Scrowcroft’s point of view is asinine. “We’ve had 50 years of peace”? Really? Which 50 years were those?

For a “realist”, Scrowcroft sure has some pretty unreal notions of “peace”.

Posted by Al | January 24, 2008 2:35 PM

=========

I actually have to agree with Al. 50 years of peace, if you don’t count all the wars and stuff.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | January 24, 2008 3:55 PM

Moreover, this was a point driven home in August 2002 by none other than Bill Keller, today editor of the New York Times but at the time a columnist for the paper.

August 24, 2002

The Loyal Opposition

By BILL KELLER

If candor counted for as much as courtesy, the author note under Brent Scowcroft’s now famous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last week, the one arguing against war with Iraq, might have said something like this: ”Mr. Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, now makes his living advising business clients, some of whom would be gravely inconvenienced by a war in the Middle East. And by the way, he thought Saddam Hussein was finished after the gulf war in 1991.”

The fact that the Scowcroft Group, his consulting and access-peddling firm, advises global corporations does not mean his motives are impure, and the fact that, like the president he served, he underestimated Saddam last time does not necessarily mean he is not worth listening to now.

But in the debate over the next round of war — a debate that is now, thank heaven, bursting into full flower – it is worth considering what baggage the critics bring, especially when they wear the badge of statesman. The histories, interests and attitudes of the war skeptics are as relevant as whatever psychodrama President Bush may be playing out by finishing off his father’s archenemy, or whether the drive against Iraq represents some dubious alignment of American interests with Israel’s.

It would be nice if this conversation would continue rationally, because, if you’re really interested in what happened leading up to the decision to topple Saddam, why the Iraq mission didn’t work, and what a better foreign policy might look like, bashing the neocons only takes you so far.   

MoveOn’s favorite traitor, General David Petraeus—known in the military as the author of the contemporary counterinsurgency methods and also of the seemingly effective application of that strategy in Iraq in recent months—has been called back to Washington to help select our country’s future generals:

The Army has summoned the top U.S. commander in Iraq back to Washington to preside over a board that will pick some of the next generation of Army leaders, an unusual decision that officials say represents a vote of confidence in Gen. David H. Petraeus’s conduct of the war, as well as the Army counterinsurgency doctrine he helped rewrite.

Lots of positive feedback here.

Our revulsion of war notwithstanding—and nobody should underplay how much everybody hates war, fear of war, war hysteria, and war-mongering—retooling the military couldn’t be more important. Henry the K for one is seeing a rare tectonic shift in international relations:

He also emphasized some profound changes in today’s geopolitical environment. He pointed out that the world we have known for 300 years now — the “Westphalian” international system that arose after Europe’s wars of religion and is based on the nation-state — is “collapsing.” This may be a much more profound shift than the move from dynastic to national motivations following the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna (about which Mr. Kissinger has written) and a more serious challenge to international stability than that posed by states such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The nation-state is weakening in Europe, he observed, and has met with mixed success in other parts of the world. “Only in Russia, the United States and Asia can it be found in its classic form.”

Meanwhile, across the Middle East and southern Asia, although nationalism remains a powerful force, many cast themselves as a part of a greater Islamic community defined in opposition to the West. In Mr. Kissinger’s view, a single formula will no longer adequately describe this international system.

I rag on Andrew Sullivan a lot—his punitive moralistic streak drives me crazy—but I’ve been reading him for a long time and, credit where credit is due: he’s a stylish and informative blogger. He always brings in great stuff from far and wide.

Like, for instance, this welcome news from The Futurist:

In partnership with Carnegie Hall and the Weill Music Institute, Juilliard has launched a new fellowship program called “The Academy,” intended to help talented graduates balance the cultivation of their craft with teaching and community outreach.

“The so-called reclusive artist of fifty or sixty years ago, the Horowitzes who showed up, played their concert and then left, although extraordinary artists, are gone. The world has changed a great deal, especially in America,” says Joseph W. Polisi, president of the Juilliard School. We need musicians, actors and dancers who can be good and effective representatives for their art or community and take advantage of various funding sources. That’s what the goal of this is, to provide an environment for the fellows of The Academy to really hear what their colleagues have to say, to provide the tools for them to be articulate spokespersons for the arts in schools and with school boards, etc. and to really give them a sense of their own entrepreneurial abilities.”

It’s a good thing they’re “down with capitalism,” as Sullivan says, since

[y]oung artists fresh from graduate school probably won’t have the support systems many of their predecessors enjoyed. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand in the arts is expected to grow as fast as for all other occupations through 2014, but the competition for both salaried and freelance jobs will intensify as talented aspiring artists with master of fine arts degrees will vastly outnumber lucrative openings for painters, dancers, and musicians.

I suspect this will be a continuing series. Today we note how things have changed in the movie business:***

“I slept on the beach when I first came here [to Cannes] in 1971. You can’t do that anymore.”

————

*** from a Reuters article, headlined “Stress Runs High Behind the Scenes at Cannes”

You could be like Rudy Giuliani at the Republicans’ “debate” last night: ***

Will the day that Roe v. Wade is repealed be a good day for America?” asked moderator Chris Matthews of all 10 contenders.

All except Giuliani answered in the affirmative.

Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said, “It would be a glorious day of human liberty and freedom.”

“It’d be OK,” said Giuliani, …

Hmmm, let’s see: from glorious to —> OK. That’s how to stand out if you’re in politics.

If you’re in gossip, on the other hand, you claim moral superiority over your competitors by proudly gloating that your magazine is factually correct. Really, I’m not making this up:

TAKING SHOTS: Us Weekly, consumer advocate? That’s the spin Wenner Media is putting on the title’s decision to run a story this week calling out its competitors for misleading consumers. In the piece, “All the News That’s Fake,” Us Weekly points to recent issues of OK!, Life & Style, In Touch and Star and “corrects” headlines and accompanying stories in each magazine about celebrity breast augmentations, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony breaking up, Brad Pitt wanting Jennifer Aniston back, and Katie Holmes talking about divorcing Tom Cruise.

“The level of fabrication has reached a fever pitch that we needed to do something about it,” said a spokesman for Wenner Media. “These headlines are completely egregious and misleading.”

So why not address its own mistakes while calling attention to the competition? “We do run corrections in the front of the magazine, and it happens in the regular course of news gathering,” said the Wenner spokesman. But, he added, “We don’t make up a headline.”

Bottom line: Everybody’s got their standards!

————

*** Does the human Ken Doll love America or what?

And Romney did seem to come up with the smoothest, most seamless extemporaneous answers of the 10 rivals for the nomination.

Confronted with an out-of-left-field question about what he disliked most about America, Romney answered, “Gosh, I love America. …”

Thomas Mallon wonders aloud what today’s intellectual climate bodes for the future. Here are a few of his musings:

How can American professors learn to write about literature in language that isn’t a crude, pseudo-technical insult to the text it’s supposedly explicating?

[A]re owners of intellectual property willing to realize that longer and longer copyright terms are doing more to inhibit than promote creativity?

Are American writers, artists, and thinkers truly prepared to admit that Islamofascism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating?

That last one is what caught my eye on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But this one is my personal favorite, because it addresses the question that came up after 9/11 that was never addressed honestly: why “they” hate us.

Are we also willing to admit that the universalization of English is more apparent than real? And that our general failure to know foreign languages is an act of both laziness and arrogance — one that threatens America’s legitimate claims to leadership in the world?

One reason “they” hate us is that we don’t even care enough about any of “them” to even learn their goddam languages or custums. As a nation, we are dangerously self-involved—and smug about it to boot. That has got to change.

I hesitate to write about this for fear that I will jinx what looks like a growing trend of … seriousness … in our culture, but I’m ready to pass on to you some good news for once and I don’t want to lose the opportunity.

First, a recent poll indicated that, unusually, Americans are following the 2008 presidential campaign even though they will have to continue following it for another 20 months in order to find out what happens.

[[Yes, that's how Americans are following the campaign: as a horse race, or a grand sporting event, or a soap opera---in installments. Don't laugh, but John F. Kennedy, Jr., never got the credit he deserved for reaching this insight before almost anyone else: that his generation can be made to follow politics (which they were notoriously uninterested in during the go-go Clinton years) if you present it to them as the greatest show on earth. That was the animating idea (in 1995) behind his magazine, George. ***]]

Now there is even more evidence that our population might be more attentive than it has been credit for. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says that the reports of the demise of reading may have been greatly exaggerated:

Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades

New ‘golden age of young adult literature’ declared

…

“Kids are buying books in quantities we’ve never seen before,” said Booklist magazine critic Michael Cart, a leading authority on young adult literature. “And publishers are courting young adults in ways we haven’t seen since the 1940s.”Credit a bulging teen population, a surge of global talent and perhaps a bit of Harry Potter afterglow as the preteen Muggles of yesteryear carry an ingrained reading habit into later adolescence.

Not only are teen book sales booming — up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis — but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.

All of which leads Cart to declare, “We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature.”

The piece underscores that the teenagers’ interest in books has surged as the books themselves widen their scope to include serious (”adult”) themes and issues:

Fantasy and graphic novels are especially hot, and adventure, romance, humor and gritty coming-of-age tales remain perennial favorites. In addition, racy series such as “The Gossip Girls” — often likened to a teen “Sex and the City” — have created a buzz.

More notably, though, there’s a new strain of sophistication and literary heft as publishers cater to the older end of the spectrum with books that straddle teen and adult markets.

King County librarian Holly Koelling has been tracking these trends as she writes an upcoming edition of “Best Books for Young Adults,” an American Library Association reference book.

“There has been an increase in the age of the protagonist, the complexity of the plotting and the content — the gravity of the content,” Koelling said. “I think it may be a reflection of a more sophisticated teenage population.” [e.a. See also Steven Johnson's Everything That's Bad Is Good for You, in which he similarly argues that audiences who eagerly follow the complex plots and multiple storylines of TV series like, say, The Sopranos are indicative of a smart, attentive audience, not a "dumb and dumber" one.]

The trend may also reflect more sophisticated parents, and a more “sophisticated”–not to mention more realistic—society: one in which there’s no such thing as forbidden books, ideas, and subjects, even if they are controversial.

(Or perhaps especially if they’re controversial. Because controversy sparks thinking and debate. And a democratic society needs thinking people and healthy debate in order to remain democratic. And it’s never too early to get people to start thinking.)

So let’s follow this “trend” together: Has the “dumb” and “dumber” trend reached a plateau? Is America becoming “smart and smarter”?

———-

*** In 1999, after JFK Jr.’s death, Anthony York wrote in Salon:

The four-year-old political mag is Kennedy’s legacy. After a well-publicized wrestling match with the New York State Bar exam, and a brief stint as a Manhattan prosecutor, Kennedy left his law career behind to found George, and he gave it the tagline, “not politics as usual.” When asked about its mission, he often riffed that politics was the greatest show on earth, and he wanted a magazine that covered politics the way Sports Illustrated covered sports.

George covered politics, Kennedy-style, with a heavy dose of glamor and celebrity. It made sense for a man born in the public eye, whose every developmental stage, since birth, has been captured by the cameras. The fusion of celebrity and politics defined George, from the first issue which featured Cindy Crawford cross-dressed as a midriff-baring George Washington (the magazine’s namesake)on the cover, to the most recent, dated August 1999, the political humor issue, featuring actor Ben Stiller.

“Clearly, he was not editing this magazine for people who knew a lot about politics,” said Edward Klein, former editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine and author of several best-selling Kennedy biographies. “It was an effort to reach audiences who needed politics to be sugar-coated with pop culture — and he being the greatest pop culture figure of them all.”